04.26.16

At Home With

Douglas and Bec’s Beautifully Understated New Zealand Home

There are elements of Bec Dowie’s northern New Zealand home that are impossible to capture in photographs alone. One may not realize, for instance, the scope of its rural surroundings. It may be hard to detect the relative quiet in comparison to the city where the designer, her husband, and daughter previously made their home. And it most certainly may be difficult to grasp that, despite a noticeable lack of embellishment, it’s a multifaceted — and completely modifiable — space that belies its minimal appearance. To put it plainly: Its walls move.

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04.25.16

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Get Ready to Experience Leong Leong’s Epic Infinite Sound Bath for Ford

Christopher and Dominic Leong, brothers and founding partners in the New York–based architectural office Leong Leong, have since 2009 developed a practice shaped by an understanding of architecture as a discipline in constant dialogue with other disciplines, such as art, film, and music. Their installation for this year’s edition of Sight Unseen OFFSITE is no exception: TOPO is an immersive and experiential landscape — created in partnership with ARUP and inspired by the design thinking behind the Ford Edge — that turns a flowing field of more than a thousand foam rollers into a kind of musical instrument, using acoustic actuators to pick up ambient sounds and translate them into a sonic soundscape.

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04.23.16

Saturday Selects

Week of April 18, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a massive art chaser to counteract the design hangover we've had ever since Milan: new exhibitions by SU faves like Naomi Clark, Lily Stockman, Brent Wadden, Carol Bove, Kate Steciw, and more. (Plus: the amazing golden Stabile chair by Barcelonan designer Max Enrich, above, because we couldn't resist!)

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04.21.16

Sighted

Elisa Strozyk’s Ceramic Mirrors Are Simplicity at its Best

We love a crazy design experiment as much as the next guy, but lately we've been appreciating the pleasures of simplicity. There's something so nice about an understated yet surprising approach to an ordinary technique. Enter this collection of mirrors by Berlin designer Elisa Strozyk, which are accented with panels of swirly glazed ceramic. No tricks here, unless you count rotating and blowing on the clay discs to accentuate the marbling.

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04.20.16

Fair Report

The Best of the 2016 Milan Furniture Fair, Part III

The 2016 Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone — aka the Milan Furniture Fair — was one of our favorites yet, and we were there on the ground, running around like crazy people trying to absorb a year’s worth of new furniture in less than a week’s time. According to our iPhones, we walked about 7.5 miles a day in our quest to scout great design. Here’s the last of three posts chronicling what we found.

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09.26.13

What They Bought

Zoe Alexander Fisher’s Handjob Gallery//Store

In 2007, San Francisco native Zoe Alexander Fisher was 16 and designing an eponymous line of girly cocktail dresses that sold in local boutiques and landed her in the pages of Nylon and Teen Vogue. A mere six years later, the entrepreneurial 22-year-old has today unveiled her latest project, the so-called Handjob Gallery//Store, and it couldn't possibly be more disparate: It's an online shop stocked with the kinds of weird and wacky handmade curios infinitely more likely to baffle the general public than to send it stampeding towards Saks.

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04.19.16

Giveaway

Win $2,500 Worth of Colorful Designs in Our Brand New Hue Giveaway

Give your interiors a spring color refresh! Enter our Brand New Hue giveaway by April 26, and you could win more than $2,500 worth of vibrant housewares from some of our favorite brands and stores, including Areaware, Poketo, Umbra Shift, Need Supply, Casetify, Tetra, Unison Home, and our very own Sight Unseen shop.

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04.18.16

Fair Report

The Best of the 2016 Milan Furniture Fair, Part II

The 2016 Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone — aka the Milan furniture fair — closes today, and we were there on the ground, running around like crazy people trying to absorb a year's worth of new furniture in less than a week's time. According to our iPhones, we walked about 7.5 miles a day in our quest to scout great design. Here's the second of three posts chronicling what we found.

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04.16.16

Fair Report

The Best of the 2016 Milan Furniture Fair, Part I

The 2016 Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone — aka the Milan furniture fair — closes today, and we were there on the ground, running around like crazy people trying to absorb a year's worth of new furniture in less than a week's time. According to our iPhones, we walked about 7.5 miles a day in our quest to scout great design. Here's the first of three posts chronicling what we found.

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04.16.16

Sighted

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Day 5

The Eindhoven-based Studio Mieke Meijer has been on our radar since way back in 2010, when the very first Dutch Invertuals exhibit in Milan showed the studio's amazing Bernd and Hilla Becher–inspired Gravel Plant, an architectural unit for storage and display. But this year's Space Frames installation in Ventura Lambrate was the most show-stopping the studio has ever put on, and in fact seems like a spiritual heir to that original project.

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04.15.16

Sighted

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Day 4

Visiting the pavilions at the Milan furniture fair is basically the exact opposite of going to the beach — there's tons of artificial lighting, way too much exertion, and not a piña colada in sight. Which is why we were tickled to get these images of Italian designer Cristina Celestino's Opalina collection for the glass furniture manufacturer Tonelli — the sheer dissonance made us laugh out loud. But the collection is pretty great on its own, photography (or excellent Photoshopping) notwithstanding. It includes a dressing table, a writing desk, a mirror, a coat stand, and a stool, all made from thick slabs of etched or painted opaline glass that give off a translucent and silky appearance.

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04.14.16

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Day 3

Wallpaper Handmade is always one of our favorite spots on the Milan circuit, and this year was no exception: The London-based magazine again paired up international designers with manufacturers, this time asking each team to reflect on ideas about hotels and travel. At their San Gregorio arcade spot, we swooned over Vera & Kyte's colorful ironing station, Karl Zahn's brass animal keys, Pelle's shapely soaps, and Pettersen Hein's clothing rack. But perhaps our favorite entry was by Léa Padovani and Sébastien Kieffer of the Paris-based studio POOL, who created two sculptural sofas in collaboration with Living Divani.

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04.13.16

Sight Unseen Presents

Visit Us at Collective Design This May!

From May 4 – 8 at Skylight Clarkson Sq, we are thrilled to be showing at Collective again, spotlighting ambitious new work by independent American design studios on the rise. For our 2016 showcase, Bower x Studio Proba, Chris Wolston, Fort Makers, and Only Love Is Real will debut a collection of furniture and lighting set against a backdrop of custom wallpaper developed with our amazing sponsor Designtex especially for the show.

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